[miki123211]

It's not a point of competition, plain and simple.

Better software doesn't sell more hardware. From those companies' point of view, what matters is hardware features to make consumers want the product, and manufacturing efficiency to make margins high. The quality of what's in the ROM is no more important than the quality of the fans, servos, DACs or what have you. As long as the parts don't break too often and are within specifications, they're good enough, no point in wasting money to make them better.

This, of course, is true until it isn't. At some point, somebody comes along who disrupts the space completely by making the software great and well integrated (or just by making it do what people have previously had to do in hardware), and traditional companies don't know how to cope.

[neilv]

So it might be a mix of cost-engineering, and (consequently) not having the organizational capability to do software better on the occasions that would actually would be worthwhile?